If Lord Glaston had ever felt dismayed by his daughter’s vagary he had long outworn the feeling. He was an easy-going man, cynical and tolerant; he liked Maurice. Angela could suit herself. He now threw Maurice a bright “Hullo!” hesitated for a moment, and, as nothing was said, he sauntered into the room and looked at the portrait. “Capital, really capital, Wynne,” he asserted. “A little too thin and woe-begone, perhaps.”
Maurice’s mind was revolving like a kaleidoscope; the dominant thought was that he could not yet make it an open engagement. And Angela would understand that they must see one another again before admitting the world to their new knowledge. He longed to escape, to think. He made his farewells, smiled at Angela, and departed.
CHAPTER XV
FELICIA received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the exquisite relief of pity. When he had been so cruelly silent the worst part of her pain had been the seeing of him as cruel—perhaps faithless. Now, as Maurice had hoped, she saw him beaten down, vanquished by fate. She was buried, dead, but in the darkness were no more struggles with nightmares. She read his letter quietly and did not weep, and after her morning duties were done, she went out—walked in her garden, in the woods, back through the garden to the road that led downwards among the pines. It was easier, as she walked mechanically in the fresh, chill, radiant day to grow one with her hopelessness, to accept the fact that the coffin-lid was really screwed down; easier to accept and not to think. She was afraid of sitting still alone.
Her head bent, her eyes followed the line of young grass that bordered the little footpath. Above, the pine branches still sparkled with moisture, and a tiny stream, a braided radiance ran singing a clear, shrill note beside her. Her life would go on, creeping in its narrow limits, like the footpath, with its bordering of green, no doubt; she could not see it yet, but it would grow. The sanity of the simile, after that screwing down of the coffin-lid on dead hope, was part of its bitterness. A sorrow like this would kill all great hope, cripple one, yet leave a capacity for trivial, monotonous alleviations that meant nothing. Yet as she told herself that she must try to see the ironic and sane aspect of the case, the fact of the grass border, the fact that tragedy would not keep its tragic demeanour, must try to see even the deeper sanity of the fact that the daily fulfilling of duty might come to sing a song like that of the thread-like brook beside the path, her eyes were filling at last with tears, and they were slowly rolling down her cheeks as she looked up to find Geoffrey Daunt confronting her.
Geoffrey was as unexpected, as handsome, and, apparently, as composed as ever. Three former visits had given to the unexpected a certain happy familiarity. She had been glad to see him, and although, as she looked at him through tears, she could not say that she was glad to see him now, there was relief in the sight, almost comfort in the sense of momentary escape from the crushing weight of full realization.
She was too well sunken in sorrow to feel minor embarrassments, and while she held out her hand she wiped away her tears with no explanatory word or look.
“How nice to see you. Are you again at Aunt Kate’s?” she asked.
Geoffrey, with an openness neither inquisitive nor indifferent, watched her dry her tears. She felt that he would have wiped away his own with as quiet a candour—imagine Geoffrey Daunt in tears!—and have taken it for granted that no one would ask questions. She could count upon his reticence. Already there were bonds of understanding between them.
He hesitated, however, for a moment before saying, “No; I came down to see you. Have you time for me?—time for a walk, I mean?”